Wednesday, December 02, 2009

[Update, 12/4/09: In response to a couple of comments below, I have decided to edit this post slightly.]

So Megan, our oldest daughter, thirteen years old, comes up to show me something funny a friend at school made for her. It's a little book. A picture book.

The main character is Megan the Cannibal. She is stalking her friend. His drawings of Megan and himself are crude, but funny and effective, in a cartoonish sort of way.

There is a brief narration which attends each page in the little book. Megan is a vicious cannibal, tracking her prey through the hallways of their school. Her prey flees; she follows. He hides in his bedroom at home, but Megan follows him, breaking into the house through the roof. She confronts him, binds him, blindfolds him, then takes him to her lair.

There, using previously unannounced superpowers, Megan shrinks him with her powerful Shrinking Ray Eyes. He runs for it. He hides somewhere in the kitchen. Eventually, however, Megan the Cannibal finds him and, in one gulp, consumes him.

The final scenes of the book show a satisfied Megan the Cannibal, smacking her lips, while her friend stews (literally, I suppose) with a worried expression on his face, surrounded by Megan's stomach acids. The End.

She finds it silly and hilarious and laughs about it. I find myself perplexed. My wife looks at me curiously, wondering what I'm reading into the story. I'm not sure. Suggestions, anyone? Parents of 13-year-olds, particularly those skilled in literary deconstruction and/or child psychology, are encouraged to reply.

Russell, this likely implies that your daughter's friend has seen the new Megan Fox horror flick "Jennifer's Body".

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/movies/18jennifer.html

I think there is very possibly some unwholesome innuendo going on here so you're not crazy or necessarily reading anything into it for thinking so. But of course you know the lay of the land and the people involved so you are better able to judge whether that is, in fact, the case.

Thanks for the thoughts, everybody, both those who have commented here and those who have e-mailed me. I'm going to follow the counsel of some to try get to know this kid and his family; even if he hadn’t given her the bizarre home-made comic book, Melissa and I should see that as part of our parental responsibility. But beyond that, I’m basically going to put it out of my mind. Megan is terrifically embarrassed that I posted this, as it is; she has no idea why I'm looking at her gift as anything except a bit of geeky, Monty Python-esque humor. (Love the XKCD reference, David.) And she's probably right. Most of those who have contacted me have basically said the same thing: dude, that’s one creative 13-year-old boy. Whether his inspiration was Japanese magna or some movies or who knows what, he’s still just a kid, trying to impress a friend with something clever and/or unique and/or purposefully stupid. With four daughters, no doubt I will see plenty of this over the next 15 years, so I might as well start getting used to it now.

But I think you should take down the post., If my kid made what is essentially a greeting card and sent it to a friend, I wouldn't think it cool if my kid's friend's dad posted a detailed description on the internet. Under his real name, so that my kid would be identifiable to those in the know.

Eventually, however, Megan the Cannibal finds him and, in one gulp, consumes him.

Whether his inspiration was... some movies

Hmm, a little man, consumed by a "lip smacking" woman... He's not a fan of certain Pedro Almodovar movies, is he? I'm thinking in particular of certain scenes (that I think are meant to reference each other) in Talk to Her and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! You can get just a glimps of one (though not the "consumption" part) in the trailer here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfIiNeeu8iY

and at the very end of this trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT391JArVt0&feature=related

It would be an odd 13 year old who was an Almodovar fan, but I would certainly approve.

(I think that when I was that age I would have likely made a mix tape, but I couldn't really draw that well.)

I go totally with Johnna on this one and don't fret too much at this stage as there will undoubtedly (voice of experience)be more to come as she reaches the teens.You will find you are having to think on your feet an awful lot as there is no set agenda to deal with any issue and who knows what they will be in this ever changing world!

Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."